The Stop Button

The issue opens with the JSA reading their email—no joke—and an anonymous sender telling them there will be disasters in three major cities: Seattle, Capetown, and Peking. The heroes split into pairs to investigate.

Seattle is Dr. Mid-Nite and Hawkman, except the action there begins with Star-Spangled Kid foiling a bank robbery. Once we get a bunch of Kid’s thought balloons about his cosmic rod (literally a cosmic rod, not his… anyway), it’s time for an earthquake. Hawkman and Dr. Mid-Nite see him trying to save people from above; Hawkman wants to help, but as Kid’s psychiatrist, Mid-Nite, says if they help, it’ll give Kid a complex.

So they just watch as maybe people die because one superhero isn’t enough for an earthquake.

In Capetown, Dick Grayson—oh, right, JSA is Earth-Two, which means everyone’s older… kind of like they’d kept aging after WWII but not really because Dick Grayson’s in his twenties, not his late forties—Dick Grayson’s a UN envoy and he’s there when a gas attack occurs. Dr. Fate and Green Lantern show up and do most of the work, with Green Lantern whining the whole time about how he’s not very smart and he wishes he were smart.

Finally, in Peking, we get Flash and Wildcat arriving just in time to stop a newly appeared volcano. Power Girl gets there after a page, sealing up the volcano and explaining the conceit of the comic to the heroes—writer Gerry Conway has already laid it out at least once for the reader, so he’s really hammering it in with Power Girl’s exposition. What if there were three disasters and three young heroes who really did all the work while the JSA was powerless? Wouldn’t that make a great concept for a comic?

Having read the comic, no, not really. Especially not since Conway’s wordy exposition oscillates between vapid superhero worship and redundant griping. Wildcat, for instance, spends most of the comic throwing in some asinine remark. But the rest of the heroes are still at least a little pissy about… being superheroes. Maybe some of the disconnect is all of them ostensibly being grown-ass men in at least their forties, yet still utterly feckless. Or Conway just doesn’t have a comic so much as an idea for one.

Ric Estrada and Wally Wood are on art. Lots of weird body poses, particularly with the flying (and not just Power Girl, who Estrada makes sure to get her cleavage and her leggy legs in every panel), but it’s such a rushed story, it doesn’t really matter.

All-Star Comics—returning after a twenty-five-year hiatus (sort of)—is off to a soggy start.